Congress of the United States

B

Civil War Years

By the 1850s, Western expansion prompted the question of whether slavery would be permitted in the new territories. Congressional debates over slavery frequently led to bitter personal attacks, and these sometimes sparked fistfights in the House and Senate chambers. The debates over slavery also led to the formation in 1854 of a new political party, the Republican Party, which opposed slavery, favored cheap Western land grants, and supported high tariffs to protect domestic industries against foreign competition. When House and Senate committees failed to find a compromise on slavery that would satisfy both abolitionists and the Southern states, the American Civil War (1861-1865) erupted, deciding the question once and for all. During the war, President Abraham Lincoln asserted powers beyond those given to the president by the Constitution, suspending habeas corpus (the right against arbitrary arrest), spending money not authorized by Congress, and expanding the army beyond legal limits. Congress created the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to supervise the president’s actions, but the committee took no steps to stem what amounted to an executive seizure of power from the legislative branch.

Vice President Andrew Johnson became president in 1865 after John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln. Johnson favored the interests of Southern states in the struggle over Reconstruction—the process of rebuilding the South’s tattered economic and political system. Congress moved to curb Johnson’s authority, passing a law over his veto that restricted the president’s power to remove appointed officials. Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in 1867, which spurred Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against the president. The Senate acquitted Johnson by a single vote. Johnson’s ordeal established the principle that presidents would not be stripped of power merely because they differed with Congress.

In the wake of the Civil War, Congress passed, and the states ratified, three amendments to the Constitution: the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery; the 14th, which defined the rights of citizens; and the 15th, which established voting rights for African Americans. Although Congress was granted power to enforce these amendments, it failed for nearly a century to guarantee racial equality. Beginning in 1870, however, African Americans secured voting rights in sufficient numbers to send 20 African Americans to the House and two to the Senate over a period of two decades. But these gains proved temporary. After 1876 Reconstruction policies were formally ended in the South, and the troops that were supposed to enforce the policies were withdrawn. The end of Reconstruction was a byproduct of the contested 1876 presidential election: Democrat Samuel Tilden won a majority of the popular vote over Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, but Republicans charged Democrats with voting fraud in Southern states and used various stratagems to retain the White House. In exchange for acquiescing to a Hayes victory, Southern Democratic leaders were promised the withdrawal of federal troops from Southern states and the provision of federal aid for economic development.

With the heavy hand of Reconstruction removed, the Democratic-controlled Southern states began to erect a wall of so-called Jim Crow laws that discriminated against African Americans. Many Southern states enacted poll taxes (a tax on voters), discriminatory literacy tests, and other measures to prevent African Americans from voting. Support for African American members of Congress dwindled along with the number of African American voters. The last of the first wave of African American House members left office in 1901, and another did not win election until 1929. Hiram Revels of Mississippi, the only African American senator in the 19th century, left office in 1871, and no other African American won election to the Senate until 1966, when Edward Brooke of Massachusetts won a seat.

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C

The Progressive Era

In the last quarter of the 19th century, members of Congress became increasingly preoccupied with narrow issues. Many devoted their time to obtaining pensions for Civil War veterans, winning special tax breaks for constituents, and pressing other claims against the government. The two chambers were frequently controlled by different parties, blocking most substantial legislation. Members of Congress sometimes came to the chambers while drunk and continued carousing during official sessions. Newspapers ridiculed Congress’s poor performance and shabby conduct, prompting a groundswell of public pressure for change.

The selection of senators became one of the most contested issues of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Constitution originally gave state legislatures the power to select U.S. senators. Progressive-era reformers, who supported more accessible government and increased controls on large business, attacked the Senate for its lack of public accountability. Pressure for change also mounted as more and more state legislatures found it impossible to settle on their Senate choice, sometimes resulting in seats remaining vacant. Many states devised ways of allowing citizens to express their preferences for Senate contenders.

In the early 20th century the House of Representatives and many state legislatures repeatedly pressed the Senate to accept a constitutional amendment that would change the selection process for senators. The Senate refused these pleas for change until finally the states threatened to call a constitutional convention to deal with the issue. The Senate, fearing that a convention could push through sweeping reforms, opted to support the 17th Amendment. The amendment, which the states ratified in 1913, specified that senators be elected directly through a popular vote. The shift to direct election of senators signaled one of the most important structural changes in the history of Congress, substantially modifying the Founding Fathers’ elitist design of the Senate.

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt supported the Progressive reform movement, and he successfully prodded Congress to enact a wide range of regulations between 1901 and 1908. Congress passed laws that ensured the safety of food and drugs, stopped unfair railroad pricing practices, and preserved scenic lands throughout the country. The laws made history not only because of their direct effects on the nation’s economy and natural environment, but also because they set a precedent for increased congressional regulation of U.S. economic affairs.

Congress took an even larger role in American politics as the century wore on. Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the presidency in 1912, and the Democratic-controlled Congress supported his wide-ranging legislative agenda. Under Wilson’s leadership, Congress created a national income tax, slashed tariffs (taxes on imports), established the Federal Reserve System to govern banks, prohibited child labor, and stiffened regulations against monopolies.

Subsequent presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, all Republicans, tended to defer to Congress in the legislative process. Compared to the first two decades of the century, Congress passed little significant legislation under these presidents. The Republicans controlled the Congress for much of this period, but the party lacked the unity necessary to win passage of much of its limited agenda. Many Republicans shunned government activism, believing that problems should be solved by private enterprise.

D

The Great Depression and World War II

The aimlessness of Congress in the 1920s became an acute problem following the stock market crash of 1929, which plunged the nation into the most serious economic crisis in its history, the Great Depression. President Hoover at first hesitated to take steps to confront the crisis, and his inaction helped the Democrats win control of the House in 1930. As the crisis continued, Democrats demanded that the federal government distribute cash to the ranks of the unemployed. Hoover refused, and he proposed relatively modest measures to improve the economy.

Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt capitalized on the growing public discontent, winning the White House in 1932. Roosevelt proposed a massive economic package to Congress. The 1932 elections had also delivered Congress to the Democrats, and they quickly passed programs of public works projects, unemployment insurance, banking insurance, aid to farmers, and grants to states. Roosevelt won passage of many of his emergency proposals in just 100 days, establishing a new benchmark for successful cooperation between the legislative and executive branches. Under Roosevelt’s leadership, Congress also passed a vast array of other programs, which the president dubbed the New Deal. Congress established the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate financial markets, created the Social Security Administration to provide pensions for the elderly, and set up the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to protect the rights of labor unions and arbitrate labor disputes. Taken together, these and other New Deal measures constituted the greatest expansion of government power in American history.

After his landslide reelection in 1936, Roosevelt’s congressional Democratic supporters—a broad group that embraced urban liberals and Southern conservatives—began to fall apart. Roosevelt’s greatest dispute with Congress came in 1937 when he attempted to gain control of the Supreme Court. His proposal, which critics dubbed the “Court packing” plan, would have allowed Roosevelt to appoint enough new justices to create a majority sympathetic to his policies. Even many of Roosevelt’s allies in Congress opposed the plan, and it failed miserably in both chambers.

The New Deal measures boosted the sagging economy, but a full recovery only came with the massive military spending for World War II. Congress resisted Roosevelt’s efforts to involve the United States in the war in the late 1930s and 1940. Instead, Congress passed measures that provided weapons and munitions to U.S. allies, created the Selective Service Administration to draft soldiers, and increased American military spending on warships, aircraft, and other military equipment. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 stunned the nation, and Congress approved Roosevelt’s request for a declaration of war.

Congress allowed Roosevelt to lead most of the war effort, challenging him on only a few fronts. Americans chafed at early military defeats at the hands of Japan, spurring Congress to debate whether to devote more U.S. forces to Europe or the Pacific. The debates proved inconclusive, however, and Roosevelt retained control of troop deployment decisions. Congress agreed to his 1942 request to bolster the ranks of the armed forces by lowering the draft age, but resisted his subsequent calls to expand the draft. Roosevelt enjoyed broader discretion in military spending. Congress reviewed defense appropriations, but generally allowed the president and his military advisors to spend whatever they felt necessary.

E

Cold War Years

In 1945 Congress began studying ways that it could restructure itself to improve efficiency. The expansion of federal authority under the New Deal had increased the congressional workload, but substantial structural reform of Congress came only after the war. Under the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946, Congress cut the number of its committees, added more support staff, regulated lobbying, and enlarged the Library of Congress’s Legislative Reference Service to provide research help for members of Congress and their staff. In the following years, each chamber created subcommittees to replace some of the committees that the law had eliminated, consequently blunting the effect of the committee reform. Some of the other changes proved more effective. Skilled committee staffs, for example, made it easier for Congress to marshal evidence in debates with the White House on complex and technical policy issues.

Members of Congress historically had little interest in events beyond U.S. borders. After World War II, however, the United States emerged as a superpower whose actions influence events in every part of the globe. Global Communism emerged as the dominant foreign policy issue after the war. Fear of Communist infiltration and spying for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) swept the nation in the late 1940s and the 1950s, spurring Congress to embark on wide-ranging inquiries. House and Senate hearings identified a handful of Communists, such as Alger Hiss, who may have had ties to the Soviet Union. The investigations also spread fear and suspicion through many quarters of U.S. society and ruined the careers and personal lives of scores of innocent people. The recklessness of many of the charges, particularly those of Senator Joseph McCarthy, damaged Congress’s reputation for fairness. But it was the Senate itself that in 1954 censured McCarthy for bringing the body “into dishonor and disrepute,” ending his political clout.

F

1960s and 1970s

President John F. Kennedy proposed many new laws to Congress during the 1960s. Kennedy, who called his program the New Frontier, persuaded the House and Senate to pass measures that established the Peace Corps, raised the minimum wage, and expanded Social Security benefits. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 shocked the nation, and his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, capitalized on the nation’s grief to push the remainder of Kennedy’s agenda through Congress. Johnson, a native of Texas and a former Senate majority leader, won passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 despite resistance from Southern members of congress. Johnson’s blustery style and mastery of the legislative process enabled him to push through many other major proposals. Johnson’s program, which he called the Great Society, included Medicare and Medicaid, the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Transportation (DOT), food stamps, Head Start, Legal Services, and many other reforms. In 1964 Johnson persuaded Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave him nearly total freedom to increase U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War (1959-1975). In passing the resolution, Congress in effect transferred to Johnson its constitutional power to declare war.

As U.S. involvement in Vietnam continued, Congress became skeptical of unilateral military action by the president and enacted the War Powers Resolution of 1973 over Nixon’s veto. The resolution required congressional approval for extended military operations. Although presidents have not followed all of the resolution’s provisions, some administrations have abided by the requirement to notify Congress before sending troops into hostilities. (In two cases—a Lebanon peacekeeping deployment in 1983 and the Persian Gulf War in 1991—Congress expressly approved presidential deployments of troops.) The resolution marked Congress’s reassertion of its constitutional right to declare war, but the resolution’s vague language and uneven implementation still left presidents with nearly unilateral authority to order soldiers into battle.

In 1970 Congress underwent sweeping institutional reforms. The 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act encouraged open meetings and required that committee votes be made public, allowed for radio and television coverage of committee sessions, and expanded the Legislative Reference Service (renamed the Congressional Research Service). The act also increased the number of recorded votes on the House floor. Later actions in both chambers expanded staffing, redefined committee jurisdictions, and enhanced the power of individual members and party leaders at the expense of committee chairs.

In 1973 the Watergate Scandal erupted, including allegations of burglary, obstruction of justice, and wire-tapping against Republican president Richard Nixon and his aides. Congressional committees investigated the White House, sparking one of the most dramatic political showdowns of the 20th century. In May 1973 White House officials told a Senate committee that Nixon and his staff had directed the illegal activities, leading the Senate to subpoena tapes that Nixon had made of White House meetings. Nixon refused to hand over the recordings, asserting executive privilege and national security concerns. A district court ordered Nixon to release the tapes, and an appeals court affirmed the decision. The recordings confirmed the president’s active role in the scandal.

The House Judiciary Committee voted to go ahead with impeachment proceedings, leading Nixon to resign in August 1974 rather than face the impending House and Senate action. The confrontation established the limits of presidential power and confirmed Congress’s right to aggressively investigate the executive branch. The court’s support of the congressional inquiry affirmed the value of the separation of powers, but the scandal fed public cynicism about government.